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"Efficiency and RBs?" Do Lineup Choices Affect Championships? In previous articles, we've looked at some of the traits of the forty-eight Zealots Champions from 2006. First we looked at the relationship between defensive scoring and winning percentage and found that while the champions tend to score more defensive points, they actually did it as a lower percentage of their overall score. In other words, defense did not win championships in Zealots: http://www.zealotsfield.com/zf_press_article.php?article=20070426&author=fries In a later article, we delved into the topic of consistency, looking to see if there was any link between weekly scoring consistency and a winning record, and we discovered that there was no connection at all between scoring consistently and championships: http://www.zealotsfield.com/zf_press_article.php?article=20070511&author=fries So far, the only thing that has shown any definite correlation to a winning record and championships is average weekly scoring. It's pretty basic: If your Zealots Fantasy Football team scores more points on average, you will win more games and be more likely to win a championship. But in a desire to leave no stone unturned in our ongoing effort to find additional factors that correspond to a higher winning percentage and championship seasons, there is one other area I'd like to look into: Starting lineup choices. We can cover this by following two different but related paths - efficiency and RBs. "Efficiency" is a widely used term in the NFL, and it can refer to many statistics: quarterback TD to interception ratio, running back yards per carry; red zone scoring percentage; third-down conversion percentage, and others. But all of these are essentially ways of measuring how effective a player or team is out of a given number of attempts in a certain situation. Similarly, in Zealots fantasy leagues, "efficiency" is used as a statistic measuring how effective a team is in picking its starting lineup. All Zealots leagues use MyFantasyLeagues.com (MFL) as a league-management tool, and MFL keeps track of starting points, bench points, and "potential points" for each week in the Scoring History report. "Potential points" uses a team's full roster and takes the highest scoring options using both offensive and defensive flex players, and gives us a way to calculate a team's efficiency each week - It's simply the ratio between a team's starting points and the potential points they would have scored if they picked the best lineup for that week. For example, suppose a given team scored 120.00 points in a week using the starters they picked. But if they had started all the players who actually scored the highest for that week, then suppose they might have scored a best-possible 155.00 points. This would give them an efficiency score for that week of 120/155 = 77.4%. Respectable, but not perfect. But unless a team's roster only has enough players to put into a starting lineup, their efficiency will almost definitely be less than 100%. The challenge for every FF owner is that no-one knows going in who will be their highest scorers before the games start - a steady high-scoring stud in your starting roster may suddenly get injured in the first quarter, or some third stringer might unexpectedly explode for a career-high while he's sitting on your fantasy team's bench. No one can predict with 100% accuracy what might happen in a given week. When you add in the huge roster size of Zealots (53 slots), it makes it even more unlikely that a given team will be able to choose every high-scoring player to start out of all their options at every position. In addition, the use of O-Flex and D-Flex slots adds to the possibilities and only makes the choices even tougher: Should a team start that top-tier WR who is inconsistent or that middle-range RB who has a tremendous match-up potential? Maybe start another DE facing a weak offensive line and a slow QB, or a LB who's normally reliable but is now dealing with a nagging injury? These are the hard choices every Zealots owner faces every week during the season. So efficiency in Zealots is a measure of how well a given owner picked their starters, and will likely always be less than 100%. But when averaged over an entire season, it could give a sense of how well an owner was able to field their best starting lineup week after week. But what range of efficiency is expected and normal in a Zealots league, and more importantly -- does it actually relate to winning? Does a higher yearly average for efficiency really correspond to a higher winning percentage, or might it just mean that a given owner was able to pick the "best" options off their mediocre roster choices on their way to a loss each week? And what about the position options in those starting lineup choices - do they matter? In fantasy football, the familiar rule is that RBs are like gold - you can never have too many. But not every team can have a stud like LaDainian Tomlinson or Larry Johnson as their premier, must-start RB.
So with the option to start a third RB in a Zealots league O-Flex slot, are 3-RB teams any better? Does fielding a 3-RB lineup impact a team's overall efficiency? And most importantly -- Is there a link between starting 3 RBs and a higher winning percentage? That is what we'll look into in the rest of this article. So, as usual, let's do some number crunching to find out…. Below is the familiar table of the 48 Zealot Champions from 2006 with their winning percentage and average weekly score. We've now also added their average weekly potential points, season-long average efficiency, and the number of times in the 13-week regular season that they had three RB in their starting lineup:
As suspected, no-one had a perfect 100% average efficiency - it's just too hard to predict which lineup choices really are the best ones before the fact. The highest average efficiency was by the 13-0 perfect season Z-34 San Diego Chargers, with an average of 86.9%. The Z-34 Chargers also had the highest single-game efficiency rating of 98.1% during week 6, when they scored 191.80 points out of a best-possible 195.43. At the other extreme, the Z-1 Carolina Panthers had the lowest season average efficiency of 73.6%. But they didn't have the lowest single-game efficiency rating among the champions - that came from the Z-43 Carolina Panthers, who had a single-game efficiency rating of only 54.6% during week 11 when they scored only 100.78 points out of a best-possible 184.61. But their season average efficiency was a much more respectable 77.6% Looking at the number of times teams started three RBs, we see that every championship team started 3 RBs at least once during the season. Ten championship teams started 3 RBs each and every week in the 13-game regular season, while the Z-32 New Orleans Saints did it only once. Overall, the champions achieved an average efficiency of 79.3% and started 3 RBs an average of 9.4 times in the season - pretty high for both numbers. Next, let's again compare the champions with the "worst" teams from each league (based on each league's lowest winning percentage team, or the team with the lowest points if more than one was tied for lowest percentage). Here are their results from 2006:
Now we see average season efficiencies ranging from a high of 86.2% for the Z-20 Cleveland Browns down to only 68.0% for the Z-41 Houston Texans. In terms of individual games, the Z-45 Houston Texans had the highest single-game efficiency rating of 97.9% in week 6, when they scored 186.31 points out of a best-possible 190.31. The Z-18 Miami Dolphins had the worst single-game efficiency rating among the bottom-dwelling teams, getting only 45.0% in week 12, when they scored only 96.02 points out of a best-possible 213.60. Among the worst teams of each league, we also see a lower likelihood of starting 3 RBs: While three teams still started 3 RBs every week, eleven of the worst teams went all season long without starting a third one. Overall, among the worst teams the season efficiency was an average of 74.0% and the average number of times starting 3 RBs was only 5.6. Both these numbers are clearly less than the champions - so we may be on to something here! Let's whip out the familiar charts to see if the relationship we suspect holds up. First, we'll again refresh our memory with the blatantly obvious relationship we found several articles ago between winning percentage and average weekly points scored:
There again is that clear relationship between scoring more points and winning more games, with a very high R2 of 0.81 (remember again that the R2 value shows how clustered the points are to the trend-line -- a value of 1.00 would show a perfect linear relationship with every point exactly on the line). We may not be lucky enough to see as tight of a relationship between winning and efficiency or the number of times starting 3 RBs, but given the difference in average values between the champions and the worst teams, I suspect we're going to see some sort of correlation. Let's first try by plotting winning percentage versus average weekly efficiency:
Ah-ha -- There it is! Winning teams DO tend to have a higher efficiency! There's quite a bit of scatter in the points, but the overall trend is evident, and the R2 value of 0.43 is still large enough to clearly imply a relationship. We can't say for sure what the cause is - whether teams win because they're more efficient at picking starters, or if teams win because they have high-scoring starters, which then raises their efficiency rating. But clearly there is some link here. What about the number of times starting three RBs? Let's see how that relates to winning percentage:
Well, it's not as clear as we might have hoped, but there still does appear to be some link here. Note also that multiple points may be at a given winning percentage and number of times starting three RBs. But, the losing teams were the only ones that never started 3 RBs during the season, and 22 champions started 3 RBs at least 12 times during the season while only 6 losing teams did. Adding a trend-line does give some additional evidence, even though the R2 value is down to only 0.20. There are a lot of exceptions, but I think we can conclude that overall, the champions did tend to start 3 RBs more often than the worst teams, and that the number of times 3 RBs were started does correspond at least somewhat to a higher winning percentage. But to be sure, let's look at it from another perspective. We know that higher average weekly scoring definitely corresponds to a higher winning percentage (see that first graph). If starting 3 RBs does relate to a higher winning percentage, then it should also relate to a higher scoring average, too. Let's check that out:
It's still about as scattered as the previous chart, but that relationship also seems to hold when we look at it in terms of higher scoring. There are still many exceptions, but in general, starting 3 RBs does seem to have a relationship to both scoring more points (R2 of 0.23) and winning more games (R2 of 0.20). It's definitely not a hard-and-fast rule, and we can see plenty of cases where exceptions occur, but there seems to be enough of a relationship to at least conclude that the trend exists. OK - so champions are more efficient and also tend to field three RBs more often in their starting lineup. But are these two things related -- Does starting 3 RBs tend to make a team more efficient or vice-versa? Let's look at that as our last chart:
Hmmmm…. There's even more scattering now and our R2 value is down to 0.07, which is almost zero. I think we'd really be stretching to try and say there is a relationship here. That's a little surprising to me, but it does show that efficiency and starting 3 RBs are completely independent things. So putting it all together, what do we now know about winning Zealots championships? Let's list them all:
Of course, all this may be interesting, but how much it will help you win a Zealots championship is open to debate. Advice like "score more," "pick your high scoring players each week," "try to have a high-powered offense," and "get three stud RBs and start them often" may be true, but doesn't offer much. It's up to you to decide the best ways to go about them. This is because when it comes to roster management and submitting line-ups, it's really all conjecture until the games are over. Then it's easy to have 20-20 hindsight. But the challenge is to correctly guess before-hand which players to try to get on your roster and which ones of them to start in a given week. And as to that, all I can offer you is the same advice I offer myself (since I have yet to win a Zealots championship): "Have fun, and Good Luck!!!" If you have any comments or questions on this
article, or if you would like a copy of the spreadsheet used for
this article in MS Excel, please feel free to contact the writing
staff at
writingstaff@zealotsfield.com. |
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